Re: How to package inputrc

[Bengt Richter <bokr@bokr.com>]

On +2020-07-13 00:01:32 +0200, Jonathan Brielmaier wrote:
> Hi folks,
> 
> an annoying thing for me in a default Guix installation is the lack of
> an inputrc definition[0]. So while using the shell I miss going through
> my bash history via "page up"/"page down" keys.
> 
> To tackle this issue I created a simple inputrc and copied to
> `/etc/inputrc`:
> ```

What hat are you wearing? Admin or user as logged in, or user as user
of a particular app, or?

Of course, as owner of your machine, you may do as you please, if you can ;-)

But IMO user preferences should stay out of the root directory, like /etc/...
so I would put your mods in $HOME/.inputrc, as your ArchLinux referece [0] discusses,
or maybe under ~/.emacs.d/ if it's just emacs you want to tweak.

As you say, other distros provide defaults, but unless you want to modify
everyone's experience who logs in on the machine, I would say stick to
$HOME/.something, where something IMO should not be more global in effect than need be.

Think twice about anything you need sudo to accomplish :)

I think it is a kind of namespace hygiene problem, when it is not clear who gets
to define names and what they do under what circumstances.

My 2¢ ;-)

> # alternate mappings for "page up" and "page down" to search the history
> "\e[5~": history-search-backward
> "\e[6~": history-search-forward
> ```
> 
> In order to achieve this more elegant I could write a simple service to
> copy the file to /etc. Another option would be a small package.
> 
> I think other distros provide one in the default, basic installation:
> ArchLinux[1], Debian[2] and openSUSE has even a longer one.
> 
> Are others missing that too? What do you think?
> 
> Good night
> Jonathan
> 
> [0] https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Readline
> [1]
> https://git.archlinux.org/svntogit/packages.git/plain/trunk/inputrc?h=packages/readline
> [2] https://packages.debian.org/buster/all/readline-common/filelist
> 

-- 
Regards,
Bengt Richter